I was never exposed to Sendak as a kid and can't recall any specific reaction my son had to Where the Wild Things Are.
However, Shel Silverstein is really annoying, both the passive-aggressive tree and the poetry.
I loved Silverstein as a kid. Like, I thought it was worth memorizing Where The Sidewalk Ends, and memorization does not come easily to me.
If Moby Hick hates "A Boy Named Sue" I don't want to hear it.
Katie Roiphe is an idiot, and Where the Wild Things Are is not remotely about "not being safe in [one's] room".
It's by Katie Roiphe? No wonder it gets everything astoundingly wrong.
Another book which is totally awesome: George and Martha. We acquired it recently and it's better than I remembered from my own childhood.
His Nutcracker illustrations were indeed creepy, but I wasn't scared by any of his own written/illustrated books.
If children really are supposed to be terrified, then that's one more reason I was right to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to my son.
And I never read Outside Over There, which does look like it could be scary but is not actually part of her argument.
I loved Where the Wild Things Are as a child. In fact, the phrase "I'll eat you up I love you so" was something that my grandmother said regularly which would suggest that it predates Sendak.
Sendak never meant much to me. I can recognize that the pictures are gorgeous in an interesting way, but there was never any emotional heft that brought me back to the books, and to the extent I had a reaction, it was mild distaste (not so much WtWTa, but In The Night Kitchen.) I haven't picked it apart, but I think that whatever the books were doing emotionally wasn't something I felt an need for as a kid.
11: There's a section in A Lover's Discourse about such phrases.
I avoided mentioning Roiphe by name because I think that this piece errs in ways that are not Roiphe-specific. I only used her piece because it was a nice distillation of the conventional wisdom.
Here's how the NYT led off its obit:
Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children's book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn.
Anybody who thinks the Wild Things were threatening creatures ought to take another look at Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel. Even in the more sanitized modern versions, when the big bad wolf threatens to eat you, he's not kidding around.
I think the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood might be about sex also.
I do think that's right -- Sendak's books felt like the world was a surreal, dangerous place, but the child protagonists were capable of navigating them safely.
Roiphe is a twit, but Sendak did acknowledge that the Oliver Hardy mustaches were also Hitler mustaches, and that the cooks' putting Mickey in the oven was Holocaust imagery.
Pierre is beyond awesome. God, I love that book.
17: The conventional wisdom about Sendak was created with Sendak's encouragement, but I still don't feel compelled to buy into it. Moustaches and ovens are going to mean something different to adults than to children, and Sendak knew it. I don't for a second believe that Sendak was trying to evoke Hitler and the Holocaust in children's minds, though those things shaped his perspective and his art.
Pierre is beyond awesome. God, I love that book.
I notice that you use the present tense, and I feel the same way. I gather the rest of the world is more impressed with Night Kitchen and Wild Things, but I'm all about the Nutshell Library, and especially Pierre.
Actually, let me retract -- WTWTA and ITNK didn't do much for me, but Pierre and Chicken Soup With Rice were awesome.
Maybe it really comes down to meter -- pictures are nice, but even as a kid, I either wanted paragraphs of prose, or rhyme and meter. A few poetically chosen words on each page and all the weight in the pictures? Not getting through.
I don't think I ever encountered a Maurice Sendak book other than "Where the Wild Things Are", which I basically responded to by saying the story made no sense. Also it may have been disappointing because I confused it with the "Little Monster" books by Mercer Mayer.
Anyway, what this article claims for Maurice Sendak is what I believe to be true about Roald Dahl.
the "Little Monster" books by Mercer Mayer
Wow. I loved those when I was a little kid, but had almost completely forgotten about them.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox was pretty scary.
I propose a millenium-long prohibition of the use, threat or brandishing of the word "subversive" and its relatives, w/r/t artistic or other cultural matters.
Also, I suggest that, when next a celebrated children's author dies, the obituaries/think pieces be assigned to persons well outside the demographic that remembers said author's work most self-consciously.
I cannot recall ever feeling anything other than irritation towards Sendak, or Dr Seuss for that matter. Even as a kid I couldn't stand them.
I don't think the people of the Andaman Islands want to write obituaries or think pieces about children's authors.
25 to 23.last.
24: Dr. Seuss is great.
Hey, fuck off, critics. Maurice Sendak, the hipster Mercer Mayer.
I don't think the people of the Andaman Islands want to write obituaries or think pieces about children's authors.
We'll never know until we ask.
what this article claims for Maurice Sendak is what I believe to be true about Roald Dahl
I was genuinely scared by some Roald Dahl books, especially The Witches.
1.2: Shel Silverstein wrote "A Boy Named Sue." Why do you hate Johnny Cash and, by extension, our Lord and Savior and America and freedom and the hardworking middle class, Moby?
I was genuinely scared by some Roald Dahl books, especially The Witches.
The Uncle Oswald stories never scared me.
Embarrassingly, I found Charlie and The Great Glass Elevator terrifying. I mean, not in the sense of not being able to read it or having nightmares, but really quite scary. When my kids brought it home, I had to leaf through it and check that I was no longer afraid of Vermicious Knids. I don't know why that got to me -- it's obviously coated in a huge dose of silliness.
31: My mother bought me those when I was ten, in an understandable moment of confusion. I wasn't scared, but I was bemused.
24: I almost wonder if not liking Dr. Seuss might be a regional problem -- that the rhythm doesn't flow properly in whatever heathenish dialect you spoke as a child. The only other explanation is that you have no soul.
Sendak was subversive, but not nearly to that extent that Friends was.
I liked early Dr. Seuss before he sold out.
Instead of watching horror movies as a kid I would reread those parts of the Roald Dahl books. The Vermicious Knids, the witches removing their wigs, the whole story about the bullies who were poaching the wildlife and then strapped the good kid to the back of a swan (that book probably wasn't supposed to be for kids anyway).
34: Was it Switch Bitch? Because I can see how you'd think that was a children's book.
No, the title is My Uncle Oswald. Really, honestly, a natural mistake.
The authorial Gestalt* of the Uncle Oswald stories is recognizably the same as that of R.D.'s books for children.
* WhatEVER.
Shel Silverstein wrote "A Boy Named Sue."
Also, "The Devil & Billy Markham" which is pretty fun.
Which was what was so bemusing -- it was clearly the same sort of book, by the same guy, and then the seducing celebrities into providing sperm samples to stock a sperm bank by slipping them aphrodisiacs and getting them to fuck one of the conspirators with a condom got started.
33: huh, we were just discussing Vermicious Knids over at another blog the other day, with reference to their similarity to the Olympic Games mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville. I was terrified of them too. I think it was the uncertainty about what they'd actually do to you when they caught you (as Grandma Bucket noted, they can't bite your heads off because they haven't got any mouths).
36: just precocious good taste and an instinctive dislike of tetrameters, I think.
44: Ah but,
Christopher Lehman-Haupt called it "a festival of bad taste that is at heart so innocent that we soon forgive it and enjoy ourselves," "thoroughly juvenile fun," and said "I haven't had so much fun of this sort since my last all-night joke-telling session at summer camp."I guess you just didn't appreciate juvenile fun as a juvenile.
I learned this week that MCA's side-project production company actually made a movie about Maurice Sendak, which is just a bit uncanny in retrospect.
(I also learned why I wasn't as big a Beasties fan as everyone I knew was - although I like them, MCA's voice gets on my nerves after about three songs)
43: also "25 Minutes to Go", I think.
I used to dislike The Giving Tree also, but I explained here why my opinion changed.
I had not seen those mascots before. Old-fashioned nightmare fuel.
Upon further inspection, wow, they stuck with the Lisa Simpson logo that everyone made fun of when it was unveiled five years ago. It literally doesn't look like anything other than, you know, Lisa Simpson etc. I don't even know what it's supposed to look like.
1: Moby, you should listen to Silverstein's 1969 album Freakin' at the Freaker's Ball to restore your opinion of him (maybe).
OT: Obama's been quoted saying that Biden on SSM was unplanned and kind of out of line. So, either it was all planned and they're really committed to being cagy about it, or yay Joe! While it's not ideal in a political, I do enjoy the Biden uncontrolled motormouth.
My childhood was entirely free of books by Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, or Roald Dahl. No Winnie the Pooh, either.
I loved Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic as a kid and don't have any memory of the tree outside of adults talking about how much they hate it on blogs I read as an adult.
I'm sure I read Where the Wild Things Are and my sister has actual memories of it, but I have none. So I'll always remember Sendak for his Colbert interview.
My nephew loved There's a Nightmare In My Closet, and it held up well to all the re-readings. I was surprised to see a toy gun on every page. That is no longer standard in my circles.
53.--
Well what the hell did you read?
I don't for a second believe that Sendak was trying to evoke Hitler and the Holocaust in children's minds
Well, sure. I read In the Night Kitchen to my girls when they were five or so, and I certainly didn't teach them about the Holocaust at that age. That would be like reading them a children's book called Everyone Gets Incinerated. But when you learn that it really is Holocaust imagery, it's a Holy Shit moment that deepens the meaning of the book; the fear of capture and the joy of liberation are primal things, and they're essential to the story.
The stories are empowering, but the threats in them aren't meant to be merely comical. Sendak also said (in one of the Terri Gross interviews?) that "We'll eat you up, we love you so" is meant to be taken at face value. The empowering thing in both WTWTA and Pierre is that the kid defies authority, gets into some serious shit, masters himself and makes peace with the parent(s). The path of resistance leads to peace--what a beautiful message.
The message of Chicken Soup with Rice is, of course, to defy foodie bullshit about seasonal eating.
7: The Stupids books are remarkably prescient in terms of the general direction of US popular culture since their publication.
Am I allowed to threadjack(ish) yet? 57.1 makes me wonder when you are supposed to start talking to your kids about the Holocaust and so on. I know by MLK Day in her kindergarten year, Mara had better have heard everything from us already, but it's hard to sit her down and talk about the history of slavery and discrimination. Instead we just let her overhear the conversations we have already, but I feel like we should be doing something more proactive soon.
by MLK Day in her kindergarten year, Mara had better have heard everything from us already
This sounds wrong, other than for very low values of everything: nothing she hears in kindergarten is going to be shocking or upsetting without prior explanation. It may be so vague and cheerful that it's incomprehensible, but you can explain at home what the hell they were talking about in school (which is how I handled it, mostly).
60: I know from Val's experience that there was a lecture about all the things black people weren't allowed to do (well, presumably only some of the things) and that MLK wanted to change that so that people of all colors could be friends, which is of course what eventually happened. She knew about segregated schools, drinking fountains, restaurants, buses, and I don't remember what else, and then wanted to talk about race obsessively for the next week. She also insisted that "Martin Loofah King" was the correct pronunciation, but I don't think that actually came from her teacher.
I don't think talking about discrimination (to a black kid, at least) makes a whole lot of sense if you don't get into the slavery side of things first, which we have a tiny bit in mentioning that Mara's ancestors were brought over from Africa. She just isn't going to realize that this is different from my ancestors bringing themselves over from Europe.
Actually, Lee has a close relative who was deeply involved in Brown v. Board of Ed, so coming at it from the direction of a story that happened involving people we know and whose pictures she recognizes might work.
by MLK Day in her kindergarten year, Mara had better have heard everything from us already
I'm not sure about this. My kids basically learned about slavery and discrimination through the MLK Day celebration at their school (which is very ethnically mixed, and they really make a big deal of it), and it was the right environment, I think. A local preacher read the "I have a dream" speech, and when they heard "one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers," there they were, assembled, realizing the dream. To me, that's a pretty positive setting for confronting ugly stuff. And then they come back with questions, and you can tell them all about the horrifying things people do to each other. "So, remember when Mickey got put in the oven?"
Juneteenth's coming up -- have a cookout with an age-appropriate history lesson? That way you're having fun, not just dropping random history on her out of the blue. And then next February you can link back to it (with conversations here and there inbetween).
I think the Holocaust can probably wait longer than slavery -- that seems like maybe a late grade-school conversation. I don't remember talking to the kids about it in any planned kind of way, but they certainly know the outlines by now.
Apropos 62. The kids all got little MLK magnets to color.
63: She's actually got another whole year before kindergarten, so it's not as if this is any sort of emergency. We do a variety of black-pride activities and talk about the history of black people in America a fair amount, which is what we did before she came along too.
I was definitely reading about the Holocaust in excessive depth by age 8 or so, but I don't think that's anything I'd recommend.
Lee does not remember ever having not known about slavery and segregation, but she also went to church with L/nda Brown and was born during the civil rights movement and just would have had a hard time avoiding knowledge. She would prefer we talk to Mara while Mara's still young, but she's not exactly taking the lead in doing that.
We do a variety of black-pride activities and talk about the history of black people in America a fair amount
Honestly, I think you don't need to worry. Having to have a talk about slavery seems like it'd be more necessary for an all-white couple in North Dakota (sorry, North Dakota, but you know what I mean), where it could literally never come up without a big self-conscious effort. Given that it's something you talk about, she's heard slavery mentioned, she's heard some of the history, all you need to do is explain things a bit as they come up and she seems interested. Kids pick up information like sponges -- i had a funny moment at parent teacher conferences where Sally's social studies teacher praised all the extra research she'd done on ancient Greece, and Sally denied having done any such thing. Turned out she'd been in the room while my dad was going off about hoplites, and stuff came back to mind in class.
Do I ever give any parenting advice other than "Don't worry about it, it'll work out fine?" This may not actually be the panacea I think it is.
Speaking of sharing horrifying things with your children, it occurs to me that my daughters might be ready for Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book. That's going to be a blast—that book had me in tears.
69: I do pretty well with not worrying, but I definitely overthink. I'm pretty sure stuff about race/class/gender (in our situation, at least) warrants that, though.
69: For example, when Lionel Dahmer asked you about the funny smells in the basement.
A fellow PCV in Samoa was a gay man who claimed that a previous co-worker, Mrs. Dahmer, had tried to fix him up with her son Jeffrey.
I'm sure those kids would have got on great.
I hope the guy didn't talk about this to the Samoan people. I'd hate for them to think that all Americans are cannibals.
Do I ever give any parenting advice other than "Don't worry about it, it'll work out fine?" This may not actually be the panacea I think it is.
Don't worry about it, it'll work out fine.
I had a talk with feminism about six months ago with my four year old, explaining that a while back men didn't think women could do some jobs, and that some men still think that, and that they were wrong, and that she should always say "boys and girls are equal" and not let any boys tell her that she can't do something just because she's a girl. A few weeks later I caught her bossing around a much smaller boy at school, making him fetch her a toy from the sandbox, with her saying "you get that for me, boys and girls are equal." Awesomeness.
Maurice Sendak also always vaguely unsettled me as a child, I didn't and don't really get his books (I don't dislike them, just don't love them especially much like I do say, Dr. Seuss, or really get what the fuss is about).
"with feminism" s/b "about feminism" of course. Although feminism and I are at least social acquaintances.
Like most white parents, I am terrified about talking to my five-year-old about race. But I can talk to him about baseball. So we end up talking a lot about Jackie Robinson.
FWIW, one of my children (I don't recall which) was frightened by the monsters in WTWTA. Kai, I think.
I don't recall any Sendak from my childhood, but as an early reader, I was mostly reading to myself throughout my living memory, and it was mostly older stuff lying around the house.
Oh, and Ant and Bee books.
I rather like Sendak now. pf is probably right, but I find that a lot of popular writing about kidcentric culture claims to be from kids' viewpoints while being transparently adult in outlook.
79: Like most white parents, I am terrified about talking to my five-year-old about race.
You know, probably the best thing my father ever did for my social and political development was introducing me to the idea (at age 7 or so?) that to grow up white in the US is to be inculcated with racism.
My mother made me a strong feminist, but that was more the product of a long series of conversations than any one statement.
while my dad was going off about hoplites
More of a peltast man, is he?
Nah, it's the phalanx or nothing for him.
Like most white parents, I am terrified about talking to my five-year-old about race
I never did until Iris started talking about how all the white kids at her school are nicer than all the black kids. Meanwhile, her first best friend was biracial, we have various friends who are black, and several of her most beloved adult neighbors are black as well (plus her kindergarten teacher whose retirement led Iris to weep). Plus several classmates that we know she likes are black or biracial.
So we reminded her of all this, and also talked about why it might be that a lot of the other black kids she knows might be mean (she has observed on her own that the drug dealer's daughter next door never gets love, only yells).
She seems to have passed through her Li'l CCC phase, however.
My mother made me a strong feminist
Dad insisted she do so.
She seems to have passed through her Li'l CCC phase, however.
I hope she at least built some nice trails and stuff.
77: I distinctly remember my dad telling me that I could be whatever I wanted to be when I grew up (I was obsessed with astronauts at the time) except a daddy for obvious reasons. And I thought hard about this and said "Even a football player?"
In retrospect the impulse to find counterexamples should have worried them.
In retrospect the impulse to find counterexamples should have worried them.
"Well, of course you could become a philosopher, but..."
Sally and Newt had a bit of "Look at me being oppressed" as white kids in a majority Dominican school: not serious bullying, but feeling outsidery. I've given them some talks about how they know what it's like to feel that way, so when you're in a situation where you're the majority, empathize and include people. Dunno if I did any good.
On feminism, I occasionally worry that in Newt's first relationship where domesticity is an issue, that he's going to think he's striking a blow for equality by insisting that his partner (assuming she's female) do a fair share of the housework. I mean, not that she shouldn't, but we've probably raised him with a skewed sense of what the norm is that he's supposed to be rebelling against. (Sally will be perfectly happy living in whatever level of squalor any domestic partner chooses. She is truly my daughter.)
I know by MLK Day in her kindergarten year, Mara had better have heard everything from us already
Jesus, no. She's got her whole life to be depressed about how horrible people are to each other. Let kids run around blissfully unaware of that shit for as long as possible.
Kids are perfectly aware of how horrible people treat each other, so they just need to have things related to their experience. "You know how your teacher makes you do really unpleasant things and doesn't pay you?"
93 is not to be brought up directly after the Nat Turner lesson.
The conventional wisdom about Sendak was created with Sendak's encouragement
I went to a Sendak exhibit at the Jewish Museum in NYC back in the early oughts, and was struck by Sendak's descriptions of writing each book: he really stressed, over and over, how excruciating it was for him to reach so deep into his psyche and go to such dark places to produce Where the Wild Things Are, The Night Kitchen, etc. It seemed almost comically Tortured Artist Effect to me.
I remember reading Sendak's books as a child, but mainly because I love his drawing style. I don't remember them as being scary or unsettling at all to me at the time. I can see the dark side of them now, but it just didn't occur to me back then that Max e.g. was going through anything particularly harrowing; to me he was just using his imagination to have fun. This might be because I had a pretty darn stable and safe childhood, as these things go.
Speaking of sharing horrifying things with your children, it occurs to me that my daughters might be ready for Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book. That's going to be a blast--that book had me in tears.
I love that book. But I thought you were only supposed to give it to the children of people you hate.
Lessons take in unpredictable ways. I remember my mother saying something when I was maybe 13 or 14 - not advice, just a general empathetic observation - hat left me impressed with the importance of being honest with myself about my sexual orientation, no matter what it might turn out to be on examination; she doesn't remember this at all.
Where the Wild Things Are always pissed me off, because Max spent about three years out on a long voyage to the land of the wild things, he comes back, and his dinner is still warm. What kind of dinner stays warm for three years?
And what was wrong with LRRH that she couldn't tell her grandmother from a wolf?? And beans that grow, overnight, into a giant beanstalk? WTF. ,man. Oh and don't even get me started on the subject of wardrobes.
96: But M/tch, strangers really do have the very best candy! FACT.
If I was king all children would be issued a free copy of Pig Will and Pig Won't in the interests of promoting that the country should have fewer buttheads.
I'm especially fond of the Free Pony coupon.
And the shiny new quarter that I hope mommy didn't take.
50 - the mascots apparently have CAMERAS FOR EYES! Kid D has 2 (same mascot, different sizes) blue plush ones, which are nicer than the metallic versions.
My dad's current facebook profile pic is the horrible logo in pink, with FUCK THE OLYMPICS written over it.
I was mostly unaware of race as an issue until my early teens. My parents had one conversation with me when we moved to a new town and they found out that the one black kid in school (adopted) had been harassed by other kids. They made it very clear that I'd be in serious trouble if they heard about me doing anything like that. The town as a whole displayed the sort of diversity you'd expect from a UMC Boston suburb in the seventies. When we moved to Geneva two years later, the local international school had a significant minority of non-white kids, but there didn't seem to be any awareness of race until later, and even then it was a mostly theoretical one. The exception was M. Buehrer, our lovely substitute physics/math teacher in eighth grade, who gave little talks on proper racial hierarchy. He was promptly fired and parents were promised he'd be kept far away by the very apologetic principal. (How dumb do you have to be to do that in front of a class which is one third Arab, did he think the kids don't talk to their parents? And how dumb did the school have to be to hire the deputy leader of the local fascist party, even given that they only had a few days to find someone midyear?).
Like most white parents, I am terrified about talking to my five-year-old about race.
I find this to be a truly odd statement and wonder where you get "most" from. That wasn't my experience as a kid -- I don't remember exactly when I tuned into racism, but I know my mother wasn't worried about talking about it. If anything, she would have been more concerned about not talking about.
And, really, how hard is it? You introduce a book or two about Dr. King or Ruby Brides into the reading rotation and talk about fairness. I'm not a parent, but that's how my white nieces and nephew were raised and I know other parents who've done the same. My [insert imaginary collective noun for nieces and nephews] have been to the MLK march in Austin every year since they were born.
Thorn, as to your question, my sister is doing similar things -- books, the March -- with her black 4-year-old daughter. (I'll call her A.) I'm not sure how much they talk about racism existing in the present, but they do talk a lot about race.
Certainly my sister hasn't gone into slavery with A yet and don't imagine she'll do that for quite a while. I think it's appropriate to shield little ones from the horror and the violence of that and the Holocaust; I'm not sure when I think it's time to talk about those things, but I don't think you have to in order to talk about discrimination.
My sister has read and thought about this a lot, which certainly doesn't make her an expert, but she has considered different perspectives.
Talking about slavery will be complicated by the face that A's direct ancestors weren't brought over as slaves since they weren't brought over at all. (For those who haven't heard me talk about her before, she was adopted from Ethiopia.)
And there you have my rambling anecdata.
I was in a craft store the other day and saw that Crayola has a set of markers that are literally called "Multicutural," which kind of cracks me up. The name, not the concept.
(They also come in crayons and pencils. Spike, there's your way in.)
And, really, how hard is it?
Someone gets me.
206.2: To be clear, I'm not saying that there aren't hard parts of talking to kids about race and racism (and sexism and homophobia), but starting the discussion doesn't seem like something to be scared of. As with other difficult issues, you mostly let the kids take the lead in going further after that.
Terrified is probably an overstatement, but 'afraid of getting it wrong somehow' is probably correct. I've heard a lot of white people my age talk about how their parents had said well-meaning things about race, but it was obvious to the kids later how racially screwed-up the parents were, and you don't want to be those parents. No way to avoid it, but it's an area with a significant potential for sounding like an ignorant jerk, which is intimidating.
There should be a pamphlet. "If American is an unjust society beset by racism and sexism, why can't my daddy exploit enough people that I can have a pony?"
106: The studies I've read point to "most" not going much beyond "Oh, sweetie, that lady's skin is brown because different people have different color skin and it's really not polite to talk about it." This is a good summary article that's a shorter version of what was in NurtureShock.
A good friend who's Jewish (and now raising an adopted black daughter) said when she was growing up her family explicitly framed "Intro to the Holocaust" as being about Jews who struggled and fought back against injustice rather than people who had something happen to them and that she used a similar approach in talking to her daughter about race.
I can't find the archive thread about the small child who, fresh from seeing Aladdin, pointed at a passing Sikh in the supermarket and said very loudly "LOOK, DAD! A GENIE!"
113: And be the change you want to see, etc., obvs.
106: [insert imaginary collective noun for nieces and nephews]
Nibelungen?
"Don't be rude, son; they prefer 'djinn'."
52: or, Obama's noticed that it's playing really well and wants to keep the story going another day or two. Which is also awesome, but for other reasons.
Hmm. I am not sure if anyone ever specifically told me about racism or sexism or anything like that; I think my parents took a very lassiez-faire, we will answer any questions asked/there are books in the house that will answer any questions asked approach. Mind you, as a middle-class white family that was a pretty safe system.
117: I tried that but the Secret Service made me leave.
Upon further inspection, wow, they stuck with the Lisa Simpson logo that everyone made fun of when it was unveiled five years ago. It literally doesn't look like anything other than, you know, Lisa Simpson etc. I don't even know what it's supposed to look like.
I think it's supposed to be a stylised/jazzy "2012".
The Crayola markers are hilariously great. "Ethnic-sensitive colors," wow. (I do feel for the marketing person who had to write the description, though. It's HARD to come up with the right phrasing that lets customers find your product, without being offensive.)
My basic observations about racial issues and parenting are:
1. Waiting to "bring up race" can itself be a luxury. Families that do this -- like my own extended family -- are trusting that their children aren't likely to be badly harmed in the meantime. Given the dynamics of race in the US, if their kids are white, they're often correct in this assumption.
2. In contrast, other families choose to proactively integrate race as part of other daily conversations BECAUSE they don't want to have to be playing catch-up after the first time their child gets badly hurt or shocked.
3. Parents who are scared to bring up race are sometimes (accurately) responding to the fact that their children may innocently pick up and paraphrase something they've said and it will come out in a way that is hurtful or upsetting to a friend or neighbor. So they avoid talking about race at all.
Unfortunately this tends to contribute to the unconscious assumption that race is something that non-white people have.
Entire books and blogs are maintained on the topic of how families can integrate anti-racist thinking into their daily lives. Suffice to say that totally avoiding the topic for years does tend, in my experience, to produce the kind of adults who make gushing remarks such as "I love exotic people!" or ask "Can I touch your hair?"
I grew up in lower or maybe lower-middle class white neighborhood. We knew all about race. This did not lead to enlightenment among my peers.
112, 114: Interesting. This:
I've heard a lot of white people my age talk about how their parents had said well-meaning things about race, but it was obvious to the kids later how racially screwed-up the parents were, and you don't want to be those parents.
just isn't my experience at all. I certainly know white people who might want to do better (including talking about it earlier) but not who view their parents as having been so screwed up that they're scared by it.
Different sample, I guess, though I wouldn't have thought so, and I definitely talk a lot about parenting and about racism in general with people. I'll have to try out this thesis explicitly on some of them.
123 is smart and thoughtful, of course.
Waiting to "bring up race" can itself be a luxury.
This is right, and something I was also thinking about last night. For white parents of white kids, the question is "whether and how"; for parents of Kids of Color (how 'bout that, Crayola?), it's just "how."
The thing that I think is harder is talking to white kids about white privilege without inducing white guilt.
127: You mean harder than talking to them about racism? Yeah. I had some somewhat awkward conversations with Rowan about that, because he'd been bullied by black kids for racial reasons but then when he got moved to the country suddenly realized how he didn't fit with that white norm either and wasn't sure whether to consider himself more urban if urban equaled black. Helping him find the words to talk about that seemed important, but I also didn't want to push him too hard.
I find this to be a truly odd statement and wonder where you get "most" from.
114 links to the very article that I was thinking of when I wrote "most".
A lot of the fear is because I want to pull off 123.2 without getting trapped by 123.3. I'm not looking forward to the day when my kid decides to tell our African-American doorman all about slavery.
It's funny, I think of myself as an awkward-on-race guilty-white-liberal, but the article in 114 describes people who seem unfamiliarly fucked up to me. Dropping out of a study on racial attitudes because you couldn't bear to talk to your kids on race is strange -- I can empathize with being awkward and embarrassed about it, but refusing to do it at all seems bizarre.
My [insert imaginary collective noun for nieces and nephews]
I think "collateral children/kids" would be accurate.
114 describes people who seem unfamiliarly fucked up to me.
They seem like an extreme case, but I think somewhat less fucked-up versions of the same pathology are quite common.
129: I can understand discomfort or concern about getting it right -- it's the "terrified" that trips me up. Apparently, though, plenty of people feel that way. Internets, I have learned something new from you.
Dropping out of a study on racial attitudes because you couldn't bear to talk to your kids on race is strange
I think it points to the artificiality of the study's proposed structure. There's a reason that "Very Special Episodes" of a sitcom are mocked as a genre -- because the idea of cordoning off an issue and talking about it at a specific time is really at odds with how most humans live their lives most of the time.
Frankly, I suspect that the issues that the study raised in 114 were really a reflection of parents' shock/discomfort with realizing the gap between what they wanted to teach their kids (we're all equal/interracial friendships are valuable) and their actual experience (interracial friendships -- valuable in theory! I have a black co-workers...whom you, my daughter, have never met because we're not actually friends, just colleagues).
My [insert imaginary collective noun for nieces and nephews]
I use "sobrinos," but that's really not a solution -- it's Spanish for either "nephews" or "nephews and nieces," because the girls get subsumed under the boy category.
133: "Terrified" was perhaps too strong a word. "Have a significant level of trepidation about" would be more accurate.
The set of people whose set of grandparents includes one or more common elements with the set of my parents or the set of parents of my spouse.
TSOPWSOGIOOMCEWTSOMPOTSOPOMS for short.
I'm not looking forward to the day when my kid decides to tell our African-American doorman all about slavery.
My friend was five minutes away from dropping off her kid at school, when the kid says "There are four slaves in my class!"
(Friend was like "AAACK! Damage control! Damage control!" and basically imparted to her that she should say nothing until they could talk more thoroughly that afternoon, after school. They'd been reading about slavery, and her daughter was trying to connect the dots.)
My favorite book on how kids understand race is Debra Van Ausdale's The First R. It's part of what pushed me to talk openly and matter-of-factly about skin color because it's just giving the preschoolers a language to talk about what they're thinking about anyway.
"There are four slaves in my class!"
Fortunately, it was just the new gym teacher trying to build enthusiasm by using S&M themes.
"Don't be rude, son; they prefer 'djinn'."
THANKS VERY MUCH. JUST A SPLASH OF TONIC AND SOME LIME, THANK YOU.
I'm sort of fascinated by how little grasp Hawaiian Punch seems to have of gender, at age 3. Zero. When prodded, she can't/won't name any differences between boys and girls, and sort of gives you a look like she doesn't get what you're asking. There's none of the "Girls wear dresses/have long hair/etc, while boys do THIS" observations.
And she's exposed to plenty of it - it's not like we've done some fantastically sheltered job of raising her Stormy.
Is it the case that many (most, even?) white people in the U.S. believe that that we should be truly "color-blind"? That is not just that we should not discriminate on the basis of color or race, but that we should somehow not even notice it.
143: Mara was like that at 3, but Val and Alex were all about gender stereotyping everything and now she wants to categorize everything into a boy thing or a girl thing, so I can't feel smug about any of my little lectures, alas. I hope HP will be more successful.
Oh, but Mara got mistaken for a boy TWICE (I think both times by cousins who hadn't met her previously) while we were visiting her family the other day. She was wearing leggings and a long t-shirt and had her hair in flat twists (like cornrows) spiraling to a bun. I'm guessing it was because she didn't have any beads in her hair, since those are a tell-tale girl thing.
Yeah, maybe she just hasn't aged into it yet.
146: I don't know. At 3, all her classmates were very rigid and vocal about boys and girls. I suspect HP is bucking the trend already. I think things were more complicated with Mara because she was afraid of men and uncomfortable with certain feminine roles for herself, and now she's grown into a more standard situation that's age-appropriate and all that. HP doesn't have that particular baggage.
I've noticed that, for instance, when kids are playing with others they don't know in the sand box at the natural history museum, they segregate themselves according to preferences first by gender, then by age, then by race. A white five-year-old boy would rather play with a four-year-old black girl like Mara than a two-year-old white boy.
I've noticed that, for instance, when kids are playing with others they don't know in the sand box at the natural history museum, they segregate themselves according to preferences first by gender, then by age, then by race. A white five-year-old boy would rather play with a four-year-old black girl like Mara than a two-year-old white boy.
Fascinating! I wonder if anyone has done controlled studies on this.
Is it the case that many (most, even?) white people in the U.S. believe that that we should be truly "color-blind"?
I think this would be the ideal state, something to aspire to by, say, the 23rd century. Something something "the color of a man's skin should have no more significance than the color of his eyes."
The way to get there, of course, is miscegenation.
Or having the schools let kids look directly at the sun the next time an eclipse happens.
But Mama, that's where the fun is.
150: As explored a bit in "Lathe of Heaven".
